The pianist Martin Kohlstedt is artist and entrepreneur, musician, and at the same time boss of his own record label employing more than ten people. This was not anticipated, because he only started playing the piano at the age of twelve, however, the native Thuringian has published three solo albums and performs at international festivals. In our conversation, he tells us how he balances the contradictory purposes of artistic freedom, musical-industrial necessity, and business administration concerns into a harmonious overall context.

Bernd Rosslenbroich is the head of the Institution for Evolutionary Biology at the private university, Witten/Herdecke. In his book “On the Origin of Autonomy”, Rosslenbroich considers the big changes where evolution is not only the adaption of environmental conditions, but an interaction and exchange between organism and environment.

This point of view promised to be an especially fascinating talk, because Rosslenbroich considers playful procedures to be an important component for flexibility and autonomy.

We met Paul-Henri Campbell upon recommendation by his associate, the painter Aris Kalaizis. Campbell is a bilingual writer of German and English. In his essays and poetry, he often deals with modern mythologies. He has written poetry about, for instance, the Firebird Trans Am, New Yorkˈs A-Train, the aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk, and the Concorde. We talked on an autumnally cool but sunny afternoon at a café in Frankfurt.

We talked to him about how he came to literature and what it means for him …

Gerald Hüther is a neurobiologist and author. He studied biology in Leipzig and also received his doctorate there. In 1988, he qualified as a professor in the Department of Medicine at the University of Göttingen and received the teaching license of Neurobiology. Professor Hüther has published a variety of books, most recently “Etwas mehr Hirn, bitte” (“A little more brainpower, please”), where he sums up his experience and insights into the topics of purpose, individual constructiveness and the love of joint creativity.